First Year's Enjoy Fall Welcome Party

Group of First Years Enjoying Refreshments at Welcome Party

Onward and Upward!!

Congratulations to the MMSS Class of 2016 and this year's Dacey Prize winners! Your hard work and endurance will serve you well in the next chapter of your lives. On behalf of all the faculty and staff of MMSS, we wish you the very best and hope you stay in touch!

Michael F. Dacey Prize for the Most Outstanding Senior Thesis: David Kim, Drew Rubin and Andrew Zessar for their work titled "Drug-Violence Link: Studying the Relationship Between Low-Level Drug Crime and Subsequent Violent Crime."

MMSS Director Jeff Ely addresses friends and family of 2016 graduates

Group of 2016 MMSS grads pose for one last photo together

Alum Shares Experience, Values MMSS Training

MMSS alumnus Ryan Garino (pictured above with seniors Yoni Muller, Blake Heyde, Lissa Marten and Jon Cohen) joined a crowd of MMSS students for dinner in Harris Hall recently and discussed his career path since graduating from Northwestern in 1998. After NU, Ryan spent three years at The Boston Consulting Group in both Chicago and London where he advised companies in the consumer and financial industries on business strategy issues. He earned his MBA at the University of Chicago and then joined Citadel in 2003. He is currently the Head of Global Credit and is a member of Citadel’s Portfolio Committee where he is responsible for leading Citadel’s efforts investing in convertible bonds, corporate bonds, and synthetic credit. Ryan told the assembled students that the rigorous quantitative training he received in MMSS played a key role in shaping his career path and he described various ways in which Citadel employs quantitative analysis as part of its core business strategy. When asked what other key ingredients added to his success, Ryan answered, "Hustle, a great deal of hustle."

Becoming—and Staying—Rich Requires More than Winning the Lottery

While his advisees have been busy designing their projects and securing data for their senior theses, MMSS senior seminar professor Joe Ferrie has been busy with his own research. When thinking about how to address the persistence of poverty, one of the big questions is: How do family traits shape wealth and well-being from one generation to the next? In two recent working papers, Professor Ferrie is evaluating a 182-year-old experiment, Georgia’s Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, to analyze how a sudden influx of wealth affects families over time. Read more.

MMSS Student Research Published in Police Journal

Dr. Mark Iris has an unusual background for an NU faculty member: he served as Executive Director of the City of Chicago Police Board for 21 years. During his time working with the Chicago Police, he began to note that major police agencies collect massive quantities of data, but often lack funding and staff with the necessary skills to analyze these data and make full use of them to improve police operations and service to the public. During those same years, Dr. Iris was teaching part time at Northwestern, and learned of the MMSS Program. He realized a perfect match was in the making: students with strong statistical skills in need of data, and police agencies with lots of data but short on personnel with statistical skills.

Under Dr. Iris’ direction, MMSS seniors have done research for the police departments in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Philadelphia, San Antonio and Houston. Students are both meeting a crucial MMSS degree requirement (a senior thesis) while also providing a real public service. The work of a recent MMSS research team was published in the June 2014 issue of The Police Chief, one of the most widely distributed policing periodicals in the US for police executives. The article describes how the student research is conducted in general as well as details the implications of the Houston research in particular. Read more.